Category: Uncategorized

Back in the Saddle Again

January 22, 2020, New York, NY – Mystery Writers of America is proud to announce, as we celebrate the 211th anniversary of the birth of Edgar Allan Poe, the Nominees for the 2020 Edgar Allan Poe Awards, honoring the best in mystery fiction, non-fiction and television published or produced in 2019. The Edgar® Awards will be presented to the winners at our 74th Gala Banquet, April 30, 2020 at the Grand Hyatt Hotel, New York City.

BEST NOVEL

Fake Like Me by Barbara Bourland (Hachette Book Group – Grand Central Publishing)
The Stranger Diaries by Elly Griffiths (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
The River by Peter Heller (Penguin Random House – Alfred A. Knopf)
Smoke and Ashes by Abir Mukherjee (Pegasus Books)
Good Girl, Bad Girl by Michael Robotham (Simon & Schuster – Scribner)

BEST FIRST NOVEL BY AN AMERICAN AUTHOR

My Lovely Wife by Samantha Downing (Penguin Random House – Berkley)
Miracle Creek by Angie Kim (Farrar Straus and Giroux)
The Good Detective by John McMahon (Penguin Random House – G.P. Putnam’s Sons)
The Secrets We Kept by Lara Prescott (Penguin Random House – Alfred A. Knopf)
Three-Fifths by John Vercher (Polis Books – Agora Books)
American Spy by Lauren Wilkinson (Penguin Random House – Random House)

BEST PAPERBACK ORIGINAL

Dread of Winter by Susan Alice Bickford (Kensington Publishing)
Freedom Road by William Lashner (Amazon Publishing – Thomas & Mercer)
Blood Relations by Jonathan Moore (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt – Mariner Books)
February’s Son by Alan Parks (Europa Editions – World Noir)
The Hotel Neversink by Adam O’Fallon Price (Tin House Books)
The Bird Boys by Lisa Sandlin (Cinco Puntos Press)

BEST FACT CRIME

The Ghosts of Eden Park: The Bootleg King, the Women Who Pursued Him, and the Murder that Shocked Jazz-Age America by Karen Abbott (Penguin Random House – Crown)
The Less People Know About Us: A Mystery of Betrayal, Family Secrets, and Stolen Identity by Axton Betz-Hamilton (Hachette Book Group – Grand Central Publishing)
American Predator: The Hunt for the Most Meticulous Serial Killer of the 21st Century by Maureen Callahan (Penguin Random House – Viking)
Norco ’80: The True Story of the Most Spectacular Bank Robbery in American History by Peter Houlahan (Counterpoint Press)
Indecent Advances: A Hidden History of True Crime and Prejudice Before Stonewall by James Polchin (Counterpoint Press)

BEST CRITICAL/BIOGRAPHICAL

Hitchcock and the Censors by John Billheimer (University Press of Kentucky)
Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps: A Life of John Buchan by Ursula Buchan (Bloomsbury Publishing)
The Hooded Gunman: An Illustrated History of Collins Crime Club by John Curran (Collins Crime Club)
Medieval Crime Fiction: A Critical Overview by Anne McKendry (McFarland)
The Mutual Admiration Society: How Dorothy L. Sayers and her Oxford Circle  Remade the World for Women by Mo Moulton (Hachette Book Group – Basic Books)

BEST SHORT STORY

“Turistas,” from Paque Tu Lo Sepas by Hector Acosta (Down & Out Books)
“One of These Nights,” from Cutting Edge: New Stories of Mystery and Crime by Women Writers by Livia Llewellyn (Akashic Books)
“The Passenger,” from Sydney Noir by Kirsten Tranter (Akashic Books)
“Home at Last,” from Die Behind the Wheel: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Music of Steely Dan by Sam Wiebe (Down & Out Books)
“Brother’s Keeper,” from Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine by Dave Zeltserman (Dell Magazine)

BEST JUVENILE

The Collected Works of Gretchen Oyster by Cary Fagan (Penguin Random House Canada – Tundra Books
Eventown by Corey Ann Haydu (HarperCollins Children’s Books – Katherine Tegen Books)
The Whispers by Greg Howard (Penguin Young Readers – G.P. Putnam’s Sons BFYR)
All the Greys on Greene Street by Laura Tucker (Penguin Young Readers – Viking BFYR)
Me and Sam-Sam Handle the Apocalypse by Susan Vaught (Simon & Schuster Children’s Books – Paula Wiseman Books)

BEST YOUNG ADULT

Catfishing on CatNet by Naomi Kritzer (Tom Doherty Associates – Tor Teen)
Killing November by Adriana Mather (Random House Children’s Books – Alfred A. Knopf BFYR)
Patron Saints of Nothing by Randy Ribay (Penguin Young Readers – Kokila)
The Deceivers by Kristen Simmons (Tom Doherty Associates – Tor Teen)
Wild and Crooked by Leah Thomas (Bloomsbury Publishing)

BEST TELEVISION EPISODE TELEPLAY

“Season 5, Episode 3” – Line of Duty, Teleplay by Jed Mercurio (Acorn TV)
“Season 5, Episode 4” – Line of Duty, Teleplay by Jed Mercurio (Acorn TV)
“Episode 1” – Dublin Murders, Teleplay by Sarah Phelps (STARZ)
“Episode 1” – Manhunt, Teleplay by Ed Whitmore (Acorn TV)
“Episode 1” – The Wisting, Teleplay by Katherine Valen Zeiner & Trygve Allister Diesen (Sundance Now)

ROBERT L. FISH MEMORIAL AWARD

“There’s a Riot Goin’ On,” from Milwaukee Noir by Derrick Harriell (Akashic Books)

* * * * * *

THE SIMON & SCHUSTER MARY HIGGINS CLARK AWARD

The Night Visitors by Carol Goodman (HarperCollins – William Morrow)
One Night Gone by Tara Laskowski (Harlequin – Graydon House)
Strangers at the Gate by Catriona McPherson (Minotaur Books)
Where the Missing Go by Emma Rowley (Kensington Publishing)
The Murder List by Hank Phillippi Ryan (Tom Doherty Associates – Forge Books)

* * * * * *

THE G.P. PUTNAM’S SONS SUE GRAFTON MEMORIAL AWARD

Shamed by Linda Castillo (Minotaur Books)
Borrowed Time by Tracy Clark ( Kensington Publishing)
The Missing Ones by Edwin Hill (Kensington Publishing)
The Satapur Moonstone by Sujata Massey (Soho Crime)
The Alchemist’s Illusion by Gigi Pandian (Midnight Ink)
Girl Gone Missing by Marcie R. Rendon (Cincos Puntos Press)

The Edgar Awards, or “Edgars,” as they are commonly known, are named after MWA’s patron saint Edgar Allan Poe and are presented to authors of distinguished work in various categories. MWA is the premier organization for mystery writers, professionals allied to the crime-writing field, aspiring crime writers, and those who are devoted to the genre. The organization encompasses some 3,000 members including authors of fiction and non-fiction books, screen and television writers, as well as publishers, editors, and literary agents.

Mystery Writers of America would like to emphasize our commitment to diversity and fairness in the judging of the Edgar Awards. Judges are selected from every region of the country, from every sub-category of our genre, and from every demographic to ensure fairness and impartiality.

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It’s All Wrong, But It’s All Right

The first Saturday of the new year, and there’s no college football games today. This of course leaves an enormous hole in my day, which I should be able to fill with things like errands, going to the gym, cleaning, and (GASP) writing. One can hope, at any rate….

Yesterday was a glum, chilly, wet rainy day down here in New Orleans, and yesterday was a more-than-a-little-frustrating day at the office; Friday is my data entry day, and the website where we enter our required data for the CDC was recently redesigned…it was never the easiest data entry system (completely counter-intuitive) and this new version is…worse. When you take pride in your speed and efficiency with data entry…a slow, clumsy not-easy-to-navigate system can prove to be a crushing blow to one’s ego….like the death of a thousand cuts. And then sometimes it just kicks you out of the system, so you don’t know if the data you’ve entered actually took or not…needless to say, when I get off work yesterday I needed a drink. Or two. Or three.

Well, it wasn’t that bad, and once I got used to using it, it wasn’t completely horrible–although it took me a lot longer to get things done than it usually does; ordinarily I would have been able to get everything entered and still had some free time for filing and so forth; instead I didn’t get everything entered by the end of my shift–leaving some for another day, alas–and it certainly wasn’t as annoying as the slow, painful death of my desktop computer. Even as I sit here now, typing, I am watching the wordpress page fail to load–it’s been failing to load for nearly an hour now–while I type this on my laptop. I haven’t upgraded the desktop to the new Apple OS–remembering all too well the horror that ensued the last time I made that mistake, going up to Mojave; God only knows what fresh hells Catalina will inflect on my desktop. But I do have this lovely MacBook Air, and I suspect that at the rate the desktop is going, I’m going to probably slowly but surely be turning this bitch into my main use computer.

I mean, it fucking works and doesn’t make me wait for an hour to load a webpage, so there’s that. I am slowly but surely going from an Apple fan to an Apple hater, quite frankly.

Anyway, after the annoyance that was work yesterday, I stopped at Jean’s for our annual office holiday party, which was lovely, and then swung by Rouse’s on my way home so I don’t have to go this weekend. I also picked up Paul, and then we came home to watch the LSU gymnastics meet against Arizona (LSU has one of the top gymnastics teams in the country every year–did you know that? They are currently ranked #2 in the country and finished second at the Nationals championship meet for the last two years running; they’ve finished in the top six for quite some years running now), and after that, we watched the second episode of Dare Me, which is absolutely amazing. It’s incredibly cinematic, in the way Big Little Lies was, and the story is just so compelling, and the way it’s told…you can’t stop watching. It’s absolutely mesmerizing, and now I want to read the book again. As I watched last night I absolutely was thinking I need to put Megan Abbott on my Reread Project list. (I’ve given up on the desktop ever loading the blog page and have asked it to restart, which also takes forever.)

Today yawns open and free ahead of me; Paul is going to the office to work thus afternoon, so I have the entire day here to myself, with absolutely no excuse to get nothing done. I am currently laundering the bed linens, and have a load in the dishwasher, so as I wake up this morning with my coffee, I think I am going to continue to clean and organize; once that’s finished I am going to head over to the gym I think, get in a nice, ease-my-way-back-into-it workout, and then head home to shower and get down to serious work on writing. I want to get back into the swing of writing on the weekends, particularly with football season coming to a close as we speak, with my weekends free from it all, there’s no reason why I can’t get my shit together again. And this next year is going to be a busy one for me; I definitely need to be structuring my life and planning it out to the nth degree else I won’t get anything done.

I’ve also been sleeping really well lately, too–which also helps with the mood and so forth.

And on that note, I’m going to head back into the spice mines. Have a lovely Saturday, everyone.

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Blank Space

Well, that’s over, and there’s a sort of slight return to some semblance of normalcy this morning. I have to work today and tomorrow before the weekend starts up again–and of course, next week is a shortened week in much the same way. I didn’t want to get up this morning because the bed was feeling all kinds of comfortable, but I dragged myself out of bed and am on my first cup of coffee thus far. We’ll see how it goes.

We drove out to Elmwood to see The Rise of Skywalker yesterday, and I enjoyed it. I know there are people up in arms and angry about it–because we can’t, of course, just enjoy anything for the sake of enjoyment anymore without some segment of a fan base getting their balls retracted and their sphincters tightened–but I thought it brought everything to a nice close and the entire film itself was fun. I’ve never understood the toxic parts of fandom, but it definitely exists, and social media has given it much more of  a voice. I never thought The Last Jedi was the worst thing that ever happened to the franchise, and I loved The Force Awakens.  But even Nancy Drew fandom has toxic elements to it (If I have to read one more whine about someone’s fucking childhood being “ruined”…newsflash: your childhood wasn’t ruined and neither were your memories. And if you think they were, well, you might need to seek professional help) and the Star Wars fandom is probably one of the most toxic. But it was a lot of fun, it had a lot of action and some absolutely spectacular visuals, and it did what Star Wars was designed to do–not to make you think, but to thrill to an exciting adventure. I do think The Mandalorian might have taken some of the wind out of its sails, but I am terribly excited to see what else Disney Plus intends to do with television series in that universe.

Once we made it back home, we started streaming The Witcher on Netflix. Paul wasn’t very into it, and it seemed kind of slow to me, but I’m intrigued enough to continue watching.  I did wonder about the wisdom of hiring one of the hottest, handsomest, and sexiest actors working today and then trying to make him look as ugly as possible–and in the two episodes I watched, no shirtless Henry Cavill either. I’m not certain whether Paul will want to continue watching or not, but I thought it was interesting enough, if a little slow. Continuing won’t be a huge priority, but can we just stop calling every new fantasy series “the new Game of Thrones” or whatever network’s “attempt at Game of Thrones”? Game of Thrones was its own thing; a unique, incredibly layered and complicated series with a massive backstory and an enormous world to pull from and so many, many characters; The Witcher is practically an interior show in comparison. And building up audience expectations is always a fool’s game. Nothing is going to be, or will ever replace, Game of Thrones.

I also started rereading The Talented Mr. Ripley yesterday and have some thoughts about it as well, but they will keep until I finish reading it–but it has to do with unlikable characters and why we are so drawn to them.

And now, back to the spice mines.

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Midnight Blue

I am debating as to whether I should sign up for Disney Plus.

I really want to watch The Mandalorian, as a lifetime Star Wars aficionado, plus they have all that other cool Star Wars and Marvel stuff, not to mention all the old Disney movies. (Wouldn’t it be fun to rewatch all those cheesy Kurt Russell as a teen star Disney movies?) I can also bundle my ESPN subscription with it, and since Hulu Live is raising its prices….I may have to bundle Hulu in with it and only subscribe to live-watch services during football season.

It’s interesting how streaming has changed the way we watch television, isn’t it?

I recently added Apple Plus to our apparently never-ending collection of streaming services that we pay for, but you know what? I still am paying less than I did for cable.

Fuck you, Cox.

We started watching Octavia Spencer’s new show, Truth Be Told, on Apple Plus last night, in which Spencer plays a former journalist whose big break came writing about a murder twenty years ago–only now evidence supporting the fact that the convicted killer might have been wrongfully convicted has shown up, so she wants to get to the truth now. She’s no longer a reporter, but rather has a true crime podcast (very modern take on the crime-investigating reporter, actually), and so she starts looking into the case again. The killer, who was sixteen when he was sent to prison, is now played by Aaron Paul.  The writing was a little clunky, but Elizabeth Perkins is also cast in a supporting role, and so Paul and I are writing off the issues with the first episode as “set-up-itis” and will continue watching.

I just cannot make up my mind about adding Disney Plus to our life. I also am not certain what all streaming services I am paying for right now; and I need to get that straightened out before I go adding something new to the monthly billing.

Still–paying far less than I did with Cox. Hulu’s cost is going up about fifteen dollars–ironically, I got another thing in the mail begging me to come back to Cox–for the new price Hulu will be charging. But it’s only for twelve months–and you know once that twelve months is up Cox will go back to their absurd gouging prices again. I need more information on Disney Plus, and what all comes with it, and whether their bundling with Hulu and ESPN is worth it. (You can’t get live Hulu, which is problematic during football season, but the rest of the year it doesn’t seem to matter as much; although it will be necessary to have live streaming options once the summer Olympics roll around again next summer–can you believe it’s already been four years since the last summer Olympics? Madness.)

Heavy heaving sigh, I hate making adult decisions.

But the inbox is getting emptier–that’s the primary goal for today–and maybe, just maybe, I might get some writing done today.

And on that note, it’s back to the spice mines.

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I Just Died in Your Arms

GEAUX TIGERS!

I worked on “Never Kiss a Stranger” yesterday, and started feeling the main character more than I did. Before when I worked on the story I could picture him perfectly in my mind, but I didn’t know who he was as a person; I didn’t feel him yet as I worked on the story. Yesterday I tapped into his mind finally, which is always a relief when you’re working on a story. Characters are one of my favorite parts of writing, if not the favorite; I love discovering who these people are, figuring them out, and getting to know them in ways I’ll never really know a real human being.

One of the things I always stress when I teach workshops on character is how we all create characters every day–everyone we know basically is a character we’ve created in our heads, because we can never really know everything there is to know about someone else. When we meet someone, get to know them, we are basically creating a character in our heads; a persona based on the things they say, the things they do, the way they react, and what they tell us about themselves and their lives and their pasts. This is why people’s behavior will always surprise us, why people act in ways we never imagined they would, because we don’t really know them as well as we imagine or believe we do; we can’t, because everything that happens to someone, every experience of every day, in some way influences and affects who they are as a person, and we’re never ever going to know all those little details.

I slept long last night, almost ten hours, although I wasn’t asleep the entire night. I woke up at three, five and seven, remaining in bed and somehow managing to fall back asleep again every time. I probably should have gone ahead and gotten up at seven, but the bed was comfortable and it’s Saturday, so I thought why? Why not stay in bed as long as you want to? So I did. I’m a bit lethargic and slow to come fully awake as a result, but there it is, you know.

Last night we watched this last week’s episode of American Horror Story: 1984, and it kind of went off the rails a little bit (oh, who am I kidding? It went off the rails a lot). The idea was to have all these surprise twists, I’m sure, but the result kind of turned the plot into a mess, which means of course there’s probably a big change coming for the entire season. Great.

Also, Big Mouth, the hilarious Netflix animated show about junior high school kids going through puberty, is back. We binged four episodes last night, howling all the way through. I also like that Big Mouth isn’t afraid to have a gay tween character, Andrew, who is probably one of my favorite characters on the show–he and the sex-obsessed Jay, who is hilarious.

I have a few hours to get some things done this morning before the LSU game starts at eleven, so I guess I should head back to the spice mines. Happy Saturday, Constant Reader!

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I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For

Monday morning. I don’t feel tired this morning; we’ll see how long that lasts, won’t we? The Saints won a squeaker last night, 12-10, but they did end up winning the game despite scoring no touchdowns–when was the last time that happened?–and I went to bed shortly thereafter. We continued watching The Politician, and predictably, it’s plot has became more scattered the deeper into the season we get, like so many other shows from Ryan Murphy. We’ re still watching because it’s entertaining enough, and the acting is top-notch, and we only have a few more episodes to go before it’s finished.

I also am almost finished reading James Gill’s Lords of Misrule, which will probably be finished tomorrow. I haven’t decided what my next fiction read will be just yet–I started pulling James Dickey’s Deliverance down from the shelves last night, but couldn’t make myself start reading it. I was quite young when I saw the movie–we saw it at the drive-in, and I don’t remember what the earlier feature was, but I do remember I fell asleep while it was playing and only woke up near the end, not knowing what had happened. Deliverance was one of those movies whose plot became a part of the zeitgeist; people today may not completely know where the reference comes from, but any time someone mentions being somewhere so rural “you can almost hear the banjoes”–it’s a reference to Deliverance. It also may be James Dickey the poet’s only work of fiction; I don’t know how true that is or isn’t, but it certainly used to be true.

I also finished watching episode three of Murder in the Bayou yesterday, which has also given me some ideas (along with the thinking about Deliverance) for my own book, Bury Me in Shadows, which is what I actually think I’m going to work on for the month of October. The Kansas book is still messing with my head. I can’t figure out what to do with the plot and there are so many different ways I could revise that story that I think it might be best to leave that mess alone for now. I still want to get it finished and out of my hair, but if I can’t decide precisely how to move forward with it, well, that makes it a little more difficult to get it finished.

I need to revise my short story today, and then give it some polish tomorrow before turning it in. It’s kind of a mess right now, but I am confident once I reread it today and make some notes, it’ll all fall into place for me. The pieces are all there, but they aren’t in the right place as of yet, and that’ll have to result in some moving of shit around to make the story more cohesive. I also need to work on that other story; I think I need to change its ending in order to make it more powerful.

And now it’s off to the shower to get ready for my day. It’s a long one, alas; but I am confident I can make it through to the other side.

Like there’s a choice or something. 😉

Happy Monday, Constant Reader!

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The Twelfth of Never

God, what a year for crime fiction, and what a year for crime fiction by women. The women are killing it this year–but then, they pretty much kill it every year, and have killed it every year since Agatha Christie’s first novel was released. I’ve read so many amazing crime novels by women this year that I can’t even begin to remember them all; I know there’s been terrific novels by Alafair Burke, Laura Lippman, Alison Gaylin, Lori Roy, Jamie Mason, Steph Cha, Angie Kim and so many, many others that I couldn’t being to name them all or possibly be expected to remember them all, either. (This is in no small part, of course, due to the fact that my memory works about as well as my desktop computer since the Mojave update.) There are so many others as well that I’ve not gotten to read yet–I am way behind on my reading of Catriona McPherson, for example, and Lori Rader-Day–and I’ve also been trying read more diverse books this year as well.

And just this past week, I finished reading Lisa Lutz’ amazing The Swallows.

the swallows

Some teachers have a calling. I’m not one of them.

I don’t hate teaching. I don’t love it either. That’s also my general stance on adolescents. I understand that one day they will rule the world and we’ll all have to live with the consequences. But there’s only so much I’m willing to do to mitigate that outcome. You’ll never catch me leaping atop my desk, quoting Browning, Shakespeare or Jay-Z. I don’t offer my students sage advice or hard-won wisdom. I don’t dive into the weeds of their personal lives, parsing the muck of their hormone-addled brains. And I sure as hell never learned as much from them as they learned from me.

It’s just a job, like any other. It has a litany of downsides, starting with money and ending with money, and a host of other drawbacks in between. There are a few perks. I like having summers off; I like winter and spring breaks; I like not having a boss breathing over my shoulder; I like books and talking about books and occasionally meeting a student who makes me see the world sideways. But I don’t get attached. I don’t get involved. That was the plan, at least.

The Swallows is set at a second-tier elite boarding school in New England called Stonebridge. Alexandra “Alex” Witt has been hired to teach Lit there after leaving her previous teaching job under a cloud of some sort. The daughter of a failed literary writer who has taken to writing crime novels under a pseudonym and an Eastern European fencing Olympic medalist, Alex is a bit of a mess but also has a strong character and equally strong sense of self. The job at Stonebridge is given to her by a friend of her father’s, who is the headmaster, and when she arrives she refuses to live in the dorms and takes up residence in a crappy cabin near campus without power or phone or much along the lines of creature comforts. Alex is the primary point of view character–there are others, including another teacher/writer named Finn Ford (who is writing a book based on the school and what goes on there); a nerd boy who is on the edges of the popular kids, “The Ten”; Gemma, an orphan whose actions primarily drive the story (she is also one of The Ten), and several others. There’s also a dark secret at Stonebridge–a secret website that only a select few have access to, where the boys try to get the girls to give them blowjobs after which the boys score them…with an eye to winning what they call the Dulcinea Prize, awarded to the best blowjob performer at Stonebridge. Gemma has found out about this, and wants to do something about it–and her desire to get back at the boys who–in the most eye-opening and honest statement I’ve ever read, “see the girls as things rather than humans.” The horror of that realization drives the story, which grows darker and more complex and awful with every page.

The book is also darkly witty–there were a few times when its macabre humor made me laugh out loud–and the characters are absolutely, positively real; Lutz has created complicated people who do things that might not make sense on the surface, but that conduct and behavior only adds to their layers and complexity. It’s hard not to root for both Alex and Gemma to bring the rotten boys down, exposing their crimes to the world and the sunlight so they will shrivel up and die. The twists and turns of the story are all earned, all realistic, and all startling. The book is masterfully written, and never has a second-rate boarding school been brought to life in such a vivid fashion.

It reminded me, in some ways, of both Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and Bret Easton Ellis’ The Rules of Attraction, in the best possible way. I enjoyed both of those books, but not in the same way that I enjoyed this one; I think because Lutz’ story is more cohesive and her characters are somewhat likable and believable despite their flaws.

I greatly enjoyed this book, and look forward to reading more of Lisa Lutz’ canon.

I Think We’re Alone Now

Tuesday, Tuesday. If we can’t trust Monday, what about Tuesday? What makes Tuesday more trustworthy than Monday?

These are the questions that keep me up at night.

Well, no, not really. I actually slept fairly well these last two nights, and while I never spring from bed fully awake and ready to go in the morning, these last two mornings are about as close as I ever get to that. Would I prefer to be in bed for another hour or two? Absolutely. But I am up, out of bed, sipping some hot coffee, and getting prepared for another long day–I can sleep later tomorrow, and I am already looking forward to it. These first two days of the week, long and beginning early in the morning, are simply the worst for me. But I shall muddle through, as is my wont, and get a move on.

As September winds down, and the list of things I intended to get done this month seems to never get anything crossed off of it, I am trying to not allow panic take over. Panic is the mindkiller, to paraphrase Dune, and allowing anxiety to take hold in my head will only ever manage to make things worse–plus the added bonus of stress on top of the pressure. No thank you, very much. The last thing I need these days is more anxiety.

I need to definitely get this short story finished–no LSU game this weekend helps–and I need to get some research done for the project that kicks back into gear the first week of September. I also want to finish reading Lisa Lutz’ The Swallows–it’s really absolutely phenomenal, y’all, and so well written! It’s set, as I said the other day, in a second-tier boarding school, with several point of view characters, all in the first person; the primary main character is Alexandra Witt, a troubled teacher who left her previous job under some sort of cloud, and got the job at this new school primarily because the school president (or whatever his title is–it’s foggy up there in the Gregalicious brain this morning) is s friend of her father’s, who is an enormously successful crime writer. I really like Witt, as she is called by almost everyone in the book (although she prefers Alex); she’s layered and three dimensional and absolutely real; definitely one of the most interesting female characters I’ve come across thus far this year, which is saying something. (It really has been an exceptional year for books; I’ve read so many amazing ones, and there are so many more amazing ones I’ve yet to get to…)

The sun is now coming up and I can see light through the trees next door, beyond my windows. I hate being up before the sun comes up–always have.

We caught up with this week’s episode of The Righteous Gemstones, which we are truly enjoying, but–as always, now in this era of binge-watching, where shows are also designed specifically to be binged–watching only one episode of something kind of leaves you wanting more, and not enjoying it as much as you might have before? We do want to watch the Netflix series Unbelievable, and get started on HBO’s Succession, and I want to finish watching Murder on the Bayou on Showtime–and of course, the second season of Titans dropped on DC Universe. I enjoyed the first season, which I watched without Paul–he kind of went through a superhero burnout, after years of Arrow and Flash, so I watched it alone, and as I said, enjoyed it–the Titans were always one of my favorite comics when I was a kid–but I also don’t really remember much of it, which means I need to rewatch it anyway, in order to get caught up with it.

Ugh, I have so much to do! No stress, no stress, no anxiety.

All right, I’m going to head back into the spice mines. Have a lovely Tuesday, Constant Reader.

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Also Sprach Zarathustra

Yesterday was a day.

Never mind why–it is simply too tedious for me to get into any detail and trust me, you’d be bored to tears–but the one nice thing about it was once it was finally over and donw with and I was safely inside the Lost Apartment and in my LSU sweats, with a purring kitty sleeping in my lap, I was able to rate rested and relaxed and now, hopefully I’ll be able to get my life back under some kind of control. That would be so lovely.I work a longer day now on Fridays–five hours instead of four–but shifting to coming in later in the day was an extremely smart move.

But the good news is that I was able to finally finish reading Rob Hart’s wonderful novel, The Warehouse.

the warehouse

Well, I’m dying!

A lot of men make it to the end of their life and they don’t know they’ve reached it. Just the lights go off one day. Here I am with a deadline.

I don’t have time to write a book about my life, like everyone has been telling me I should, so this’ll have to do. A blog seems pretty fitting, doesn’t it? I haven’t been sleeping much lately, so this gives me something to keep myself occupied at night.

Anyway, sleep is for people who lack ambition.

The rise in popularity  in dystopian fiction since the turn of the century isn’t really that difficult to understand; the world is kind of on fire and each day we seem to be inching our way to the inevitable collapse of civilization as we now know it. I do recognize how pessimistic that thought is, but it’s one I’ve been finding myself having more and more as the years have passed since the century dawned with so much promise back in 1/1/00. Remember how exciting the new century seemed back then, when it was fresh and new and full of promises? Yeah, well. Who knew? I wonder if people felt the same way in 1919…but given they’d just gotten through the first world war and the Spanish flu pandemic that killed millions, probably.

Early in the 1990’s, as queer equality issues began to become more and more mainstream–with the inevitable holier-than-thou nasty religious pushback–I wrote down many pages of thoughts and ideas I had about a dystopian future world, one in which queer people finally obtained equality only for there to be a horrific and horrendous pushback, similar to the one depicted in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale that pushed back against feminism and women’s equality. I saw an America where evangelical Christianity was encoded into our law; where people of color and other undesirables began to disappear as they were blamed from everything wrong with modern society and the economy; and where those unaffected by those prejudices and legalized bigotry turned a blind eye to the suffering of fellow Americans as long as they could pay their bills and buy nice things for their family. Since that original idea–which was easy to scoff at by friends I talked about it with, as they weren’t queer or marginalized–I’ve come back to that idea, time and again, as the idea sometimes seems to be taking root in reality. I tend to avoid dystopian fiction, as a general rule; I’ve read Brave New World, 1984, The Stand, Alas Babylon, The Handmaid’s Tale and many others; I’ve watched the Mad Max films. I generally try to avoid it, to be honest; I find our the dystopia evident in our reality far more frightening and oppressive than anything I might find in fiction.

But I couldn’t get into The Hunger Games  or any of the others published in the twenty-first century to great sales and acclaim; just had zero to no interest. I got into the zombie apocalypse stuff for a while, with The Walking Dead, but even it eventually devolved into misery/torture porn and I lost interest.

But Rob Hart’s The Warehouse…I don’t know; for some reason as soon as I heard the concept behind it, months before its publication date, I knew I wanted to read it. Part of the exhausting frustration I’ve felt over the last few weeks as I slogged away at the volunteer project has partly been due to my inability to spend more than twenty minutes or so at a time with the book; the one good thing, as I said already, about today’s errands was the ability to sit in a waiting room for long stretches of time with nothing to do other than read–and occasionally delete emails from my phone.

What a wonderful, frightening, and all too realistic book Rob Hart has gifted the world with!

The Warehouse is set in a world in the not-too-distant future where almost everything has collapsed. This collapse of functionality of the general society isn’t explained; but it has to do with climate change and economic shifts and rising seas. One company, Cloud, which allows everyone to buy everything they need on-line and have it delivered quickly via drones, with MotherClouds scattered all over the United States, has pretty much monopolized means of production and delivery; their employees are given free housing and so forth and live in climate controlled dorms that are all connected with the warehouses and entertainment complexes; enclosed cities, where your every move and your every purchase is monitored. There’s health care and communal bathrooms and showers and you need your Cloud wristband to get anywhere or do anything.

Sound all too frighteningly familiar?

The story is told from three different points of view; the book opens with with a blog entry from Gibson, the man who thought up and founded Cloud and became worth billions as he essentially took over the United States; Paxton, a small business owner who invented a thing called Perfect Egg, so that you could make a perfect hardboiled egg in the microwave and peel it perfectly every time, a business that flourished until Cloud’s demands for deeper and deeper discounts eventually forced him out of business and has now landed a job there; and Zinnia, a young woman we don’t know much about who is also starting work there, but she has an ulterior motive. Zinnia and Paxton eventually cross paths, become friends, and as he works security, she begins manipulating him for information as she also starts to develop feelings for him.

It’s a terrific story, very well told, with very smart things to say about capitalism, consumerism, and how easy it is to compromise your principles in exchange for security. Bright and intelligent and well-written, you can’t help rooting for both Paxton and Zinnia to somehow make it through everything and somehow come out on top.

Most dystopian tales deal with the aftermath of nuclear war, or Big Government taking over, or some kind of religious fascism, but rarely, if ever, has the dystopia arisen out of capitalism and consumerism, and Rob Hart hits the bull’s eye squarely with this one. (Well, also Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, but Ayn Rand deserves many posts all by herself, and she wishes she had one tenth of Rob Hart’s story-telling skill)

This is destined to be a classic, and I do hope Ron Howard does the story justice on film.

In closing this, I’d like to thank Rob–and other writers like him, like Ben Winters and Adam Sternbergh–for pushing the envelope of the crime genre, melding crime and speculative fiction in clever, innovative stories that broaden our genre and enable them to tell bigger stories than we customarily see in crime fiction. I loved this book from start to finish, and it’s so layered and clever–the development of Gibson, through his blog entries, his justifications for his egotism and so forth, was chillingly genius.

Read this book. It’s amazing.

Funky Worm

Well, it’s Sunday morning and the windows are covered with condensation again, which means it’s hot and humid outside (with a chance of rain). I finished reading Laura Lippman’s brilliant Lady in the Lake yesterday, but after running my errands in the heavy heat and damp, I was pretty wiped out by the time I’d put everything away and found it incredibly difficult to focus on much of anything. I did some more cleaning, brainstormed a lot more in my journal (I’ve been having some great ideas for “Never Kiss a Stranger”) and then watched the first official game of the college football season–Miami vs. Florida on ESPN last night. I’m not much of a fan of either, to be honest, but it’s an in-state rivalry game and they don’t play each other very often. It was a great game, actually; I didn’t think Miami had much of a chance, but ended up only losing 24-20, and they had a chance to win the game in the closing seconds but couldn’t convert. LSU’s first game is next weekend–a non-conference snoozer; I don’t even remember who they are playing–and soon enough the Saints will be playing their regular season games too. I love college football, and the Saints–I only watch the Saints play in the NFL and pay little to no attention about other teams unless the Saints are playing them. (This goes all the way back to when I was a kid; I’ve never cared much for the NFL but have always loved college football…if I didn’t live in New Orleans I probably wouldn’t care about the Saints, either; but you can’t live here and not love the Saints. It’s practically a city ordinance, and I will say I’ve never seen or experienced anything like the way this city loves its football team.)

Today I have a lot to do. I am going to revise my short story that’s due next weekend, and work on a big project that needs to also be finished by next weekend, and I am probably going to mess around with “Never Kiss a Stranger” a little bit today. I am also going to reread the last few chapters of Bury Me in Shadows so I can finally get those last three chapters written, hopefully by getting a start on that today, and finishing by September 1 so I can do one last pass on the rape culture novel before sending it to my publisher. I also think I’m going to work a bit on my story for the MWA anthology. It’s already finished, and I’ve revised it already a couple of times, but I think I am going to revise it one more time, give it another going over, to make sure everything is fine and ready to go. I doubt it’ll get taken, but I like submitting stories to these anthologies, and one of these days I am going to actually make it into one of those anthologies if it kills me.

And it just might!

Oddly enough, these last week or so I’ve had a sense of general malaise–the notion that I have so much to do that I’ll never get it all done, which then creates inertia/paralysis: there’s no way I’m going to get this all finished so what’s the use in trying? This is incredibly self-defeating, and I know I have a tendency to often defeat myself, so these are alarms and triggers I know to watch out for, fight against, and not get too deeply imbedded in my brain. I don’t always succeed; sometimes the inertia/paralysis wins and I get nothing done, which only exacerbates the problem. But I somehow manage to always get everything done, which is very exciting.

This coming weekend is Southern Decadence, and this is going to be my first Southern Decadence when I am not working in the office on Frenchmen Street–I don’t even have to drive through the Quarter to get to work anymore, so I won’t be caught off-guard by seeing hordes of gay men walking around in the Quarter on my way to work. I am going to do condom duty on Friday night only, giving me a lovely three day holiday weekend to enjoy, watch LSU and get to work on the rape culture novel for its final draft before submission. I’ll be glad to have that book finished, and then I have another project to work on for both October and November, and then in December I can return to Bury Me in Shadows. If my plans hold up, I should be able to then finish revising another unfinished manuscript in January before starting to write the new Chanse, while doing the final research and prep work to get started on Chlorine. These plans are, of course, always subject to change; you never know when another project is going to drop into your lap and that could possibly change everything yet again.

I really need to make a to-do list, and do some other business-type stuff today. I’ve also started packing another box of books to go into the attic; I should probably finish that today as well. I think I’m going to read Rob Hart’s The Warehouse next, followed by Lisa Lutz’ The Swallows, and then I’ll come back to the Diversity Project, probably with Michael Nava’s Lay Your Sleeping Head.

And on that note, tis back to the spice mines with me. Have a lovely Sunday, Constant Reader!

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